Students from two classes react as they unwrap the Educational Passages miniboat kit at Manteo Middle School on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024. Teacher Stevie Gallop (center) looks on and teacher Brian Wehner (right, out of frame) documents the event. (Photo by Corinne Saunders)
By Corinne Saunders
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MANTEO — Two classes of students at Manteo Middle School will soon begin building a small sailboat that the whole community can track online upon its launch in the Atlantic Ocean.
The technology and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) classes convened to open the newly arrived miniboat kit on Monday morning. This is the first such miniboat project in Dare County.
Charles Perry, a Colington resident and world-renowned marlin fisherman, paid for the Manteo Middle School miniboat kit and was present for its opening Monday.
Perry plans to be involved throughout the process—or at least to watch it unfold and then help as needed getting it offshore.
“We’re not putting it together; the kids are,” he said.
Kelsey Oglesby, career development coordinator for Manteo Middle School, showed students where miniboats currently are in the ocean via the miniboats website. She said she’ll be bringing in a miniboat that just washed up in Corolla to the classroom so they can see what a completed one looks like in person.
Students and the public will be able to track Manteo’s miniboat after its launch. It will be outfitted with a solar-powered GPS device, which sends real-time data to the boat’s dedicated webpage, according to Cassie Stymiest. She’s the executive director of Educational Passages, the nonprofit that organizes the miniboat program.
Students learn about wind, currents, water temperature and depth, latitude and longitude and many other real-world science topics in a hands-on, autonomous way, as the miniboats program is created to be student-led, Stymiest explained.
“That empowerment is unbelievably important in any of our learning,” she said in overview of the program to Perry and Oglesby in a local in-person meeting on Sept. 12.
Cassie Stymiest, executive director of the nonprofit Educational Passages, excitedly shows the map included in each miniboat kit on which students track miniboats they launch. She discussed the program with Charles Perry and Kelsey Oglesby at an in-person meeting in Nags Head on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (Photo by Corinne Saunders)
A New Hampshire-based nonprofit, Educational Passages is on a mission to connect people globally with the ocean and with each other, according to its website.
The program started in 2008, but when Stymiest came onboard about eight years later, “it was going under,” and she said she helped turn the organization around. It launched its 200th miniboat at the end of 2023.
During the pandemic, Stymiest designed the workbooks and the kit. Her goal is for schools and students to have a long-term commitment to the program.
“Don’t just launch it and move on,” Stymiest said.
The program starts with vocabulary and terminology lessons, “so everyone’s on the same page,” she said. Even with her science background, she said she didn’t know all the terms initially.
Then students work on a “meet the fleet” assignment, describing themselves, their school and doing teambuilding work. They organize into task-dependent teams, including a sail team, a hull and field team, a deck team, a launch team and a tech team, she said.
Following its launch, students plot their miniboat’s travels on a map that includes both the Atlantic and Pacific ocean basins and helps students learn latitude and longitude, she noted.
The boat could be at sea from anywhere from a few hours to several years.
But Stymiest sees value in the unpredictability of the miniboats. People regularly her ask why the boats aren’t made to be robotic.
“We like the unknown,” she said.
‘Miniboat magic’
Perry happened upon a miniboat for the first time as he was about to start the Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament about 40 miles offshore from Morehead City this June.
“This is something really cool,” he said he recalled thinking. “I took a gaff and pulled the pole over to me.”
Before he even had gotten the miniboat into the fishing boat owned by NASCAR driver Terry Labonte, one of Labonte’s friends on the boat already had Stymiest on the phone.
Third-graders in Goose Creek, South Carolina, built that miniboat, Stymiest said.
“And of course South Carolina is crazy about NASCAR, and Terry Labonte had found their boat,” Perry said. The kids were “just thrilled to death because it was someone that they were familiar with, you know, celebrity sort of thing.”
The miniboat Outer Banks expert marlin fisherman Charles Perry found during a fishing tournament off the coast of Morehead City in June was built by third-graders in Goose Creek, South Carolina. (Photo courtesy Charles Perry)
Stymiest calls such incidents “miniboat magic.”
Another example was when Labonte and Perry relaunched their found miniboat. It passed by Oregon Inlet, circling around in the ocean a few times and eventually washing ashore in Cape May, New Jersey, “fully intact,” she said.
Stymiest happened to be at a conference with scientists in Norfolk, Virginia, and she showed them the miniboat’s route.
“What I learned is how this is a convergence zone for a ton of currents…so much in fact, the scientists have no idea what's going on,” Stymiest said of the ocean off the Outer Banks. There is an “array” of scientific buoys off the coast to study it, and together with the data collected from the miniboat’s path, “we’re all going to be learning together.”
She said students’ work is also “having that amazing science component.”
As she reviewed the curriculum booklets Sept. 12, Oglesby enthused about how the program is designed to support all learners by providing choices. It appeals to those who like hands-on projects, works well for diverse learners and “hits your high learners with…the currents and the temperature.”
Oglesby said the local community “always comes together” to support what the kids are doing, and she hopes people will cheer them on in this project, too.
Manteo Middle School students interact with Charles Perry (center, standing) on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, after opening the miniboat kit he purchased for them. (Photo by Corinne Saunders)
If Manteo’s participating middle school students become interested in the boatbuilding process, they could continue their studies at the high school level.
Manteo High School’s carpentry classes recently began their own project of building a 21-foot center console boat over the next two years, working in partnership with local boat-builders and honoring the local boatbuilding traditions—such as the “cold mold process”—according to a Sept. 12 Dare County Schools social media post.
The high school project will involve 47 students each semester and all levels of the high school’s carpentry classes, according to district spokesperson Hannah Nash.
The school system is “thrilled on so many levels to be rolling out these programs” at Manteo Middle School and Manteo High School, Dare County Schools Superintendent Steve Basnight said in an emailed statement.
The boat projects are part of ongoing district efforts to connect students’ coursework with local job opportunities, to “align” middle and high school program themes and to expand course offerings to meet the interests and needs of students, Basnight said.
“We are excited to expand and grow our programs to provide more opportunities and options for our students,” Basnight said. “An added bonus to this project is connecting students with their local maritime history and heritage.”
Perry bought the miniboat kit with proceeds from sales of the book he wrote with Bethany Bradsher, “Big Fish Better Boats: The History of Sportsfishing and Boatbuilding on the Outer Banks.”
Perry said he and his wife Jessica Loose, a longtime local educator, “just wanted to give back to the community…and felt like it was a good way to do it.”
He expressed hope that every local school will have access to a miniboat kit in future years.
For more information about the program, visit www.miniboats.org.
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